With the increase in adoption of home and small business NAS units, WD’s decision to make a product exclusively for that growing market makes some sense. According to a recent IDC personal storage report, the personal and small business 1-12 bay NAS market is the fastest growing segment of the hard drive storage market. Additionally there’s a growing number of NAS systems shipped without drives pre-installed, which raises thequestion about which drive is best for NAS usage. Western Digital wantsRed to be the clear answer for small NAS units – no thought necessary, just buy your NAS enclosure and fill it with WD Reds.

Western Digital Red SATA III - idealo Western Digital Red SATA III - idealo

This report is the latest in a series on hard drive manufacturers slipping SMR technology into existing disk lines, with little or no notice to customers. The first is our database profile, with a 67% read and 33% write workload mix primarily centered on 8K transfer sizes. The WD Red NAS Hard Drive has a SATA 6Gb/s interface, 3TB capacity, 5K spindle speed, 1TB plattersand 64MB cache. The comparables used for this review include the following hard drives: Western Digital Caviar Green (3TB, 5400 RPM, 4x750GB, 64MB cache), Western Digital AV-GP (3TB, 5400 RPM, 4x750GB, 64MB cache), Western Digital Caviar Green EARS (2TB, 5400 RPM, 4x500GB, 64MB cache), Samsung Spinpoint F4EG (2TB, 5400 RPM, 3x667GB, 32MB cache) and the Seagate Barracuda Green (2TB, 5900 RPM, 3x667GB, 64MB cache), and Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (4TB, 5400 RPM, 5x800GB, 32MB cache).All drives are tested on the StorageReview client testing platform.A Western Digital faz parceria com uma ampla gama de fornecedores de sistemas NAS para testes extensivos para garantir a compatibilidade com a maioria dos gabinetes NAS. WD has also gone to great lengths to ensure a great user experience. They’ve worked with Synology, QNAP and other NAS providers to make sure the WD Red was qualified as compatible with these popular systems and host chipsets. The drives also offer a good blend of performance and power consumption, which is key given the always on nature of NAS drives. For that little extra push on the performance side, the drives feature a 64MB cache that’s been migrated from DDR to DDR2, which should be twice as fast. With the circuit board removed we get to see the Marvell 88i9346-TFJ2 controller and recently updated to DDR2, 64MB Samsung RAM module. Reliability: Desktop drives aren’t typically designed for the demands of an always-on NAS environment. WD Red hard drives are designed to perform under tough conditions encountered in high-intensity 24x7 multi-user NAS environments. The next profile looks at a file server, with 80% read and 20% write workload spread out over multiple transfer sizes ranging from 512-byte to 64KB.

WD Red NAS Drives - Western Digital Corporate Blog On WD Red NAS Drives - Western Digital Corporate Blog

You don't have permission to access /content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-hdd.pdf We typically specify the designed-for use cases and performance parameters and don’t always talk about what’s under the hood. One of those innovations is Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology.

Western Digital’s exclusive NASware™ technology fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads which helps increase performance and reliability. WD Red hard drives and SSDs have been compatibility-tested by major NAS system providers with their NAS systems and components.

WD Support - Western Digital Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support - Western Digital

The biggest advantage of the Red SATA III drives is the fact that they have been specially developed for use in smaller NAS systems. Theoretically, these also work with normal desktop hard drives, whereby an algorithm should always determine the best possible relationship between reliability and transmission performance. For NAS and RAID environments, the manufacturer has designed these drives in such a way that they should last for many years even in continuous operation. RAID error recovery protocols also reduce the risk of failure. The MTBF is specified as up to one million hours of continuous operation. Ultimately, the Western Digital Red SATA III with NCQ support is a much more professional solution for 24-hour continuous operation than classic desktop and notebook hard drives, which of course were not designed and tested for these conditions. Available in Different Memory Capacities It is important to choose a drive purpose-built for RAID-optimized NAS systems to ensure optimum performance and preserve your valuable data. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard drive for your NAS: The Western Digital Red offered the best sequential transfer speeds out of the group of low-power hard drives. It measured 143MB/s read and 142MB/s write, well above the older 3TB Caviar Green which only managed 119MB/s read and 119MB/s write. The obvious question may be then, what’s wrong with the WD Greens and other low power drives that have been performing NAS duty to this point? The answer is really about projected use. The WD Green for instance, while the leading low power drive on the market, wasn’t designed for the 24×7 access requirements that NAS systems require. The WD Red was engineered specifically for this duty, complete with customized NASware firmware which includes critical features like intelligent error recovery controls that prevent drives from dropping off the RAID due to long recovery cycles. The drives also are engineered with "3D Active Balance technology" which tunes the drive to eliminate vibration leading to improved reliability and overall performance.The Western Digital Red 3TB drive uses a primarily single-sided PCB, with all components facing the body of the drive for thermal dissipation. The board is held firmly to the drive with four Torx screws with a vibration isolation/thermal pad mounted between the circuit board and metal body. With the new Red hard drives designed for 24/7 home and SMB NAS usage, Western Digital still found ways to improve the power consumption of their new low-power hard drive over previous generation low-power hard drives. Across the board, the new Western Digital Red offered the lowest activity and idle power values. Startup power was slightly higher than the older Caviar Green models, but not by much. Western Digital partners with a wide range of NAS system vendors for extensive testing to ensure compatibility with most NAS enclosures. We tested our batch of eight WD Red hard drives in varying configurations ranging from single drive to 2, 5 and 8-bay Synology NAS deployments.In terms of performance, the WD Red did very well not only as a single drive, but increased proportionally as we scaled up the testing in the Synology DiskStations. With link-aggregation we measured read speeds in excess of 200MB/s (8-bay) and write speeds coming in just below 170MB/s (5-bay). Random I/O performance with each model in RAID was good, showing a nice linear increase in speed with each larger RAID array. In both active and idle settings, we found power consumption to be very good, with even the eight-bay DS1812+ filled with Reds measuring under 60 watts under load and 55 watts at idle.

WD Red 3TB 3.5 Inch NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM

Although all three remaining major hard drive vendors—Western Digital, Toshiba, and Seagate—have "submarined" SMR disks into existing channels without doing much to notify customers about it, only Western Digital has done so with disks designed specifically for NAS, or Network Attached Storage, use. There's also a Red Pro line targeted to maximum-performance applications. This line is unchanged—it existed with the same branding before the SMR fiasco, and it still exists with the same branding and same models today. Understanding SMR limitations Our current device-managed shingled magnetic recording (DMSMR) (2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB) WD Red series will be the choice for the majority of NAS owners whose demands are lighter SOHO workloads. It’s an interesting decision – WD is expanding their low-power 3.5" hard drive offerings with a second line at the same time Seagate exits the "green" market, claiming low-power drives aren’t really all that beneficial or quite frankly, special. The Western Digital Red family of hard drives is designed for the 1 to 6 bay SOHO NAS space, which is about as specialized as it gets. WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).In (very) brief, SMR disks generally perform well enough in light storage workloads, with plenty of idle time between storage requests—but they can fall catastrophically flat on their faces when hit with more demanding workloads. The ZFS filesystem, in particular, tends to present SMR disks with challenges they have difficulty handling. It’s an interesting decision – WD is expanding their low-power 3.5" hard drive offerings with a second line at the same time Seagate exists the "green" market, claiming low-power drives aren’t really all that beneficial or quite frankly, special. The Western Digital Red family of hard drives is designed for the 1 to 6 bay SOHO NAS space, which is about as specialized as it gets. WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them). Ideal para sistemas NAS para home offices, usuários avançados, pequenas e médias empresas e sistemas e concumidor/comercial In broad strokes, we agree with the above quote from Western Digital's blog post announcing the new branding. The majority of consumers buying small Synology, Netgear, or other purpose-built NAS devices are likely using them intermittently, with a small number of overall users, and mostly for large files such as digital photos, movies, and music. For those consumers, an SMR-equipped Red will probably be okay—they're unlikely to push through the CMR cache, and even if they do, the SMR management firmware can probably handle the direct writes fairly well.